Office Idiots: What to Do When Your Workplace is a Jerkplace PDF
Preview Office Idiots: What to Do When Your Workplace is a Jerkplace
OFFICE IDIOTS OFFICE IDIOTS What to Do When Your Workplace Is a Jerkplace By Ken Lloyd, PhD Copyright © 2013 by Ken Lloyd All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press. OFFICE IDIOTS EDITED BY KIRSTEN DALLEY TYPESET BY DIANA GHAZZAWI Cover design by Howard Grossman Printed in the U.S.A. To order this title, please call toll-free 1-800-CAREER-1 (NJ and Canada: 201- 848-0310) to order using VISA or MasterCard, or for further information on books from Career Press. The Career Press, Inc. 220 West Parkway, Unit 12 Pompton Plains, NJ 07444 www.careerpress.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Lloyd, Kenneth L. Office idiots : what to do when your workplace is a jerkplace / by Ken Lloyd, PhD. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-1-60163268-5 -- ISBN 978-1-60163-525-9 (ebook) 1. Problem employees. 2. Interpersonal relations. I. Title. HF5549.5.E42L583 2013 650.1’3--dc23 2013012531 To my growing family. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is based on e-mail that readers have been sending to my Website, www.jerksatwork.com, and to my weekly workplace advice column that has been running in several newspapers for more than 15 years. With that in mind, I offer major thanks to the many readers who took the time to write to me regarding some of the issues, concerns, problems, and, yes, office idiots they were encountering in their work. To all of these readers, I offer sincere thanks for their confidence and candor in expressing what’s really going on in so many workplaces today. And speaking of newspapers, I also offer great thanks to the outstanding team at the Los Angeles Daily News for their enduring support of my column over all of these years. Thanks also to the Los Angeles Newspaper group for running my column in some of their excellent newspapers. Special kudos go to three outstanding newspaper professionals who have played a key role in the success of my column: Greg Wilcox, Barbara Jones, and Kevin Smith. Thanks once again to Career Press. This is my sixth book with this outstanding publisher, and I have consistently enjoyed working with their highly professional team. In this regard, I offer special thanks to Ron Fry, Adam Schwartz, Michael Pye, Laura Kelly-Pye, Gina Talucci, Kirsten Dalley, and Diana Ghazzawi. And finally, thanks also to my home team, composed of my amazing children and son-in-law, and especially to Roberta Winston Lloyd, a great librarian, researcher, editor, best friend, and wife. CONTENTS Introduction 1: Office Idiots and Their Miscommunication 2: Conflict and Office Idiots 3: Idiotic Job Interviewers 4: Idiotic Job Applicants 5: Who’s the New Idiot? 6: Meetings With Office Idiots 7: Office Idiots and Their E-mail 8: Idiotic Managerial Practices 9: Office Idiots and Their Idiotic Feedback 10: Power-Tripping Office Idiots 11: Office Idiots and Their Mindless Motivational Methods 12: Idiotic Blaming, Deflecting, and Backstabbing 13: Office Idiots in Training 14: Outrageous Behaviors, Even for Office Idiots 15: How to Avoid Becoming an Office Idiot Index About the Author 1 INTRODUCTION Many books approach the subject of absurd, ridiculous, and outrageous workplace behaviors from the standpoint of hypotheses, anecdotes, and hearsay. The result is a combination of speculation and conjecture about idiotic workplace behaviors and what to do about them. This book is different. It’s based on real incidents caused by real idiots in real workplaces. As well, the action steps to deal with them move out of the realm of guesswork and into the realm of real work. An ongoing stream of e-mail to my newspaper column and Website keeps returning to one overriding theme: today’s workplaces continue to be infested with office idiots. You would think that the recent economic slowdown would have pruned their presence to little more than a pesky weed here and there in most organizations. Or perhaps the jittery economy and current hints of recovery have somehow reenergized, refocused, and redirected the cadres of practicing office idiots. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Office idiots can be found running companies and managing departments, and they’re just as likely to function (or malfunction) as colleagues, peers, associates, fellow employees, or subordinates. You can even find them at the door in the form of job applicants. Their antics cover a vast spectrum of clueless, misguided, counterproductive, and downright inappropriate behaviors. And when left unchecked, they’re not only an annoyance, disruption, and distraction, they’re a significant source of performance and productivity issues, as well. So, herein you will find examples of some of the most widespread and disruptive forms of office idiocy, along with a full toolset with which to deal with them. This not only means the optimum strategies for working over, under, around, beside, with, without, and in spite of office idiots, but also the strategies to rein in their idiocy. It’s a compendium of what to say, what to do, and how to do it. And if you happen to possess any latent idiotic tendencies yourself, or if any such tendencies have somehow crept into your day-to-day workplace behaviors, this book shows you how to recognize and get rid of them.
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